When Things Fall Apart
Revisiting Pema Chödrön
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One of the first books many people recommend when things go tits up (an excellent British phrase I first learned from my husband — basically, when something is just totally effed by poor planning, illness, betrayal, the weather, a cranky toddler, neoliberal bullshit, greedy sociopathic narcissists with too much power, etc) is Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. I’ve recommended it myself.
I love Pema Chödrön’s clear voice and incisive distillation of Buddhist teaching. I’ve read nearly all of her books. I carried her The Wisdom of No Escape around Brazil one summer and dog-eared nearly every page. I immersed myself in The Places That Scare You my first summer at Tassajara, the Zen monastery in California, reading in the cool darkness of my creekside hut. On my most recent meditation retreat in Devon, I read Welcoming the Unwelcome cover to cover in a day. I’m a fan.
My first Chödrön book was a used copy of When Things Fall Apart I picked up at Green Apple Books on Clement Street in San Francisco one rainy Saturday night. I didn’t have a Buddhist practice then, back in the early 2000s. I did a lot of yoga, and I liked to sit in silent meditation when I was done, early in the morning, before the sun had risen or the fog had lifted, when the ships traversing the Golden Gate had to rely on their horns for safe passage. To this day, I love the sound of a distant foghorn.
But I didn’t have any kind of formal meditation practice, and I never thought I would, and most of what was in When Things Fall Apart was too Buddhist for me. I didn’t want a spiritual practice. I didn’t want to walk the path of a warrior. I just wanted to feel better in my uncertain twenty-something life — less angsty, more okay. And I think I liked what Chödrön wrote about because it normalised not feeling okay. It wasn’t that something was wrong with me. It was that feeling not-okay at times is a normal part of the human experience. This was something I really needed to hear.
Now, decades later, as things well and truly fall apart — collectively, globally — I decided to return to the classic to see what wisdom I might glean in this moment, what I might land on that can serve now. I’ve been skimming, treasure-hunting, re-familiarising myself with Chödrön’s story of having the rug pulled out of her as a young wife in New Mexico, when her husband came home from work one day and said he was having an affair and wanted a divorce, and how this moment led, eventually, to her becoming a Buddhist nun in the Tibetan tradition, taking a new name, and running an abbey in Newfoundland.
What stands out most so far, as I revisit the book I’ve given away countless times, is what she has to say about how we can use the experience of groundlessness — when there is no longer any credible myth of a safe place to land — to awaken. And I don’t necessarily mean spiritual awakening, but rather awaken to how deeply we can care, how much our hearts can open (which, really, if you are inclined to think that way, is spiritual awakening by a humbler name). Groundlessness as opportunity.
“The very first truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long was we believe that things last — that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security,” Chödrön writes. This is Buddhism 101: that we suffer because we cling to things that are by their nature impermanent.
Of course, this isn’t the only reason for suffering. People suffer because they are hungry, hurting, unloved. The people of Gaza aren’t suffering because they are clinging to impermanent things. They are suffering because they are being bombed and starved and shot. There are things in the world that are not okay, and what we need is not a different way to think about them. What we need is to change them.
I think this kind of acute suffering is different than what Buddha was getting at. His word for it, dhukka, has been mistranslated as suffering. Definitions I like better are disatisfaction, wanting things to be different than they are.
We experience existential unease when we resist what is by clinging to what we want to be. “From this point of view,” Chödrön writes, “the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land.” All illusions are vanquished by an unavoidable reckoning with reality. Reminds me of what I wrote about several weeks ago: how it feels when our assumptions about how the world works are shattered.
“Right now,” Chödrön continues, in that moment of unbearable reckoning,"— in the very instant of groundlessness — is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness.”
This is what I love, what heartens me today. This. That when things go tits up, when nothing is as it’s supposed to be, when the good guys and the bad guys have mixed themselves up beyond recognition, when the lies we’ve been fed are revealed for what they are, when what was once grand farce is now just another Tuesday, a seed is planted. The seed of taking care of those who need our care. The seed of discovering our goodness.
I care more, about more people, than I did before. I can’t always act on it, but I know that seed is there, and I seek out ways to water it. I see more pain. I am aware of more suffering, or there is more suffering to be aware of — I’m not sure which. It might be possible for me to be a bigger person, for my heart to grow. It might be possible for all of us. And imagine what we can create together with our big, open hearts. How much kindness may be possible, how much action, how much change.
Some of you know how much I love what Paulo Freire wrote: “Reality is a process, undergoing constant transformation.” Nothing is ever fixed. Nothing is ever permanent. It might suck very much, but it will change, get worse, get better, I don’t know, but it will change. We will change. There is enormous power in groundlessness, enormous possibility. As horrible as things are, there might also be the seed of something transformational, right here in the midst of the ugliness.
I choose to believe there is.
Postcard from my garden
